Plasma-Active pre-installed

Tue Dec 20 11:56:12 UTC 2011

On Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:10:52 +0100, Mario Fux wrote:
> Am Freitag 16 Dezember 2011, 11.56:37 schrieb Sebastian Kügler:
>> Hi Mario,
>
> Morning Sebas and other PA people
>
> Here finally my answers to your question.
>
> Be first a quote from some Point of View support guy:
> "I have found some video demonstrations of the working tablet and it 
> looks
> very promising." He speaks of course about PA.
>
>> On Monday, December 12, 2011 16:09:21 Mario Fux wrote:
>> > I know that's a bit on the last minute as IIRC tomorrow is the 
>> release of
>> > PA Two. So here in short my proposal or thing:
>> > My company (which atm consists just of myself and I ;-) will ship 
>> PA pre-
>> > installed on the PointOfView TAB-TEGRA-10-1 including a 8GB 
>> microSD Card.
>> > The device and offer is of course targeted to developers and 
>> bleeding
>> > edge users (and not yet end users). The price would be 350 CHF or 
>> 290
>> > EUR (excl. shipping) and 5 EUR of each sold device will go (as 
>> with the
>> > other simple computers on asimplecomputer.com) to KDE e.V. (and 
>> another
>> > 5 EUR either to PA directly or to
>> > MER, don't know yet enough about the MER structure). I hope this 
>> doesn't
>> > interfere with any plans of the PA companies and as an 10inch 
>> device it
>> > shouldn't interfere with your 7inch tablets (which I'm still 
>> interested
>> > in of course). So would this be of interest for you and your
>> > announcement tomorrow? Thus you could even fulfil your 
>> idea/annoucement
>> > (as done in Randa and other places) of shipping a preinstalled 
>> device
>> > with PA till the end of the year... ;-).
>>
>> I'd like to know more about it, hoping you can share this 
>> information here.
>> My basic concerns are quality and Plasma Active's brand value. When 
>> Plasma
>> Active becomes available as a real product, I really want it to be 
>> good.
>> There's a bunch of unknowns for me there, which you might be able to 
>> clear
>> up, or maybe you haven't thought about that in detail, yet.
>
> To make one thing clear at first. The above mentioned Point of View 
> device
> will be a device targeted to developers which want to play (and 
> hopefully
> develop for) Plasma Active. It's not intended to be an end user 
> device as I
> think PA is not yet ready for this.
>
>> - Do you create, test and support your own OS images? Is there a 
>> process of
>> quality control? How do you escalate functional problems? If a 
>> product
>> featuring Plasma Active gets on the market, and these questions 
>> haven't
>> been answered, you'll just nuke brand value and make it very hard to
>> succeed with Plasma Active in the future -- for anybody.
>
> I don't want to see the PA brand nuked as well! I plan to first use 
> or build
> on the image done afaik by Basyskom. And then hopefully contribute 
> back,
> patches probably, and other feedback.
>
>> - What's your upgrade story? The initial shininess does wear off, 
>> and as
>> Plasma Active progresses, people will need and want upgrades. If 
>> there's no
>> after-sales support (for example supported software upgrades even 
>> after 14
>> months), people will be disappointed, and that will reflect badly on 
>> Plasma
>> Active -- and scorge commercial ground for others.
>
> There is no upgrade story. But a thing I probably will work on as I 
> already
> tried to upgrade from PA1 to PA2 on my WeTab with not much success
> unfortunately.
Normaly changing repos to PA2 and doing zypper dup should work.

If you need update story we might talk. Because update is not only a 
question of PA. You need to think about the base system as well.
Probably beginning of next year we can provide something wie mer core. 
But we are still in the lab modus...

>
> There won't be much support I can deliver. E.g. the device from PoV
> loses it's
> warranty by installing another software on top (but they told me that
> they can
> help fixing hardware problems and are interested in PA images but I 
> keep you
> informed about these stuff).
Normal you need to provide support, maintenance and updates when you 
talk to hw-vendors. So just offering the basyskom image is probably not 
the best way in winning these people. So you need an update service for 
this.

>> - Also, how do you intend to give back to Plasma Active? I read that 
>> you
>
> Feedback, hopefully sometimes patches, user testing...
>
>> intend to donate 5€ sold device to KDE e.V., but see this only as 
>> very
>
> ... another idea was to spend the second 5€ somewhere to PA but there 
> is no
> legal foundation (simple computers of asimplecomputer.com always have 
> two
> times 5€ to some foundations. Normally to KDE e.V. and Debian but 
> this time
> (tablet) there is no Debian, probably Mer would be the best but need
> to check
> their legal status).
>
> Oh and btw this tablet thing won't appear as another normal product 
> of
> asimplecomputer.com on the page but as a temporary offer to 
> developers.
>
>> indirect contribution to Plasma Active. The people working on PA 
>> have all
>> invested a lot of time, energy and money. In my opinion, if you want 
>> to
>> expoit PA commercially, you should first show the same kind of 
>> commitment.
>>
>> Cheers,
>
> So I hope to have answered at least some questions. Don't hesitate to
> ask back
> or further questions.
:)
>
> Good night
> Mario
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